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by hornblowerfic_archivist



Category: Hornblower (TV), Hornblower - C. S. Forester
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-03
Updated: 2006-10-03
Packaged: 2018-05-22 12:30:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6079419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hornblowerfic_archivist/pseuds/hornblowerfic_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The reconstruction of the missing scene about Bush's amputation.</p>
            </blockquote>





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Under the sunset-reddened shield of the sky, the stream of boats coursing between the wrecked ships and the shore never slackened. Fast gigs, ant-like, crossed the bay - black moving dots on the black immobility of water, marked only by the glow of torches and the splashes of oars. As daylight faded, the hunger of the French grew more acute. Hurriedly, insatiably, they dug into the wooden carcass of the Sutherland and bit off morsel after morsel, and chewed, and digested everything, from the powder and cannon-balls and sails and ropes to rum and the leftovers of the last dinner the English captain ordered to be served before the battle commenced.

They also stripped the decks of the injured men, and Bush found himself sandwiched among others on one of the boats, between barrels of tar and the broken gilding off the Sutherland's stern. His back rested on the array of weapons the French had collected indiscriminately, steel and firearms all in one disordered heap to be sorted out later. Most of it, broken beyond repair, would go to waste, together with the shrieking, groaning and sweating human mass that was once the ship's crew.

One of Rosas' barracks was improvised into a hospital; at the entrance, an officer, with a gaunt face and his fists clenched tight to hide the tremor, sluiced the incoming flow of the wounded into nationality-based divisions. Once partitioned, the writhing bodies were put on queue that was hopelessly out of proportion to the few doctors doing their job in a hellishly mechanical sequence on the makeshift operating tables. Before the queue moved, much of the writhing would cease, and limbs froze at surreal angles, eyes blindly fixed on some unseen spot in the rim of blood and tear-crusted lashes.

Stowed away in one of the corridors, the stones of the floor hard against his back, Bush listened to the harsh commands in French that resounded through the chorus of cries and moans and the sharp clicks of metal instruments. He didn't know the language but listened all the same, searching the mass of flesh around him for a familiar face. He recognised, or thought that he recognised, people of his ship, but it was hard to tell in the brutality of the moment. His own face, he could feel it, was clean of blood, and he enjoyed the freedom of moving his lips without having to break the shell of dry clots. He mouthed a question, a call to his fellows, but nobody heard.

A few men ran past him, some of them wearing British uniforms; the last of them halted briefly near Bush and stooped to peer at him.

"It's an officer. Officier anglais, here!"

The man struggled through the foreign sounds with desperation, compensating for the lack of linguistic skill with the volume of his shout. When he knelt beside him, Bush saw that it was a youth, hardly into his manhood; probably a former cabin-boy, but he couldn't force himself to remember.

"We'll get you help at once, sir. I'm assisting as the Frogs are short of surgeons - I used to help father in his butcher's shop back home, worry not, sir."

Bush, indeed, worried not. The pain transformed into a taste of the air inside the barrack: it was hot, damp and smelling of copper, and all he wished for at the moment was to be raised from the floor upwards, to the hint of a breeze behind the open window.

Soon he was heaved and shifted onto a cloak that was to serve as stretchers. His legs bumped into somebody's knees, which, had human anatomy still held, shouldn't have been there at all, and he gasped and tried to keep himself from further unmanly display by fixing his faulty gaze on the desired window. But the breeze wasn't there; the evening outside smelled of stale gunpowder and burns, as if the patch of air filling the Rosas bay had to be conserved without change for eternity exactly as it was in the day of the great battle.

The table onto which he was discarded was still wet with the liquids of the patients before him, and he felt his coat and breeches soaking up instantly. His mind registered facts without any coherent comment, and impressions drifted through him like grains in a sandglass.

"I'm sorry, sir, the Frogs're saving opium for their injured."

The young man's voice distilled through a remembrance that kept Bush far more occupied than the lack of anesthetics. In a kaleidoscope of moments from the battle, the memory of Hornblower stuck out like a splinter of bright glass, glistening red and sharp with the shrill command the captain gave to send his crippled officer belowdecks. The pattern expanded, obligingly serving Bush with his own reply that involved an equal amount of shrill shouting and addressing everyone as bastards. The memory refused to lie: calling them so, Bush had included his captain, and for once he meant it.

"We'll have to cut your breeches open, sir," the youth mumbled apologetically.

Visions shifted, and the young face was replaced by a much older and more worn out set of features, the darker complexion of which betrayed in their owner a native of some southern province of Napoleon's empire. Perhaps Italy, guessed Bush without interest, since this change of nationality left him equally muted and incomprehensive of comments as with the French soldiers before.

But the surgeon had delicate hands and deft fingers, and the agility of his people showed when his hand rasped a knife against the blood-stained fabric of the breeches. More tearing than cutting, the Italian searched for the flesh underneath impatiently, and Bush shivered when a ragged, broken nail scraped against his skin.

With the cut in the material brought up to the patient's thigh, the doctor moved to stand on the inside of the damaged leg. His hand, sticky and warm, felt its way along the limb, digging hard into the flesh to outline the bone. The narrow but strong palm pressed harder still when it reached the hip, and the second hand was added in a swift sliding gesture to envelop the buttock and feel for the deformities in the pelvic joint. The rough palm softened as it cupped the rounded shape, a motion so different from the stern linearity of the surgeon's usual severing movements. Bush felt a cold shiver snake up to his groin.

"The bone's clean, sir," the young surgeon's assistant whispered into Bush' ear. "It's only the place where you foot had been that is fractured. This Italian cuts fast - it will not hurt, sir."

The youth's eyes were wide and dark with fear, and Bush didn't believe him for a moment. Contrary to the surgeon, the assistant's fingers trembled when he pressed under the patient's jaw to place a few inches' length of wood between his teeth. Bush shifted the wood inadvertently in his mouth until his teeth set into the dents made by the ones who bit onto it before him, and finding a sudden comfort in this set position, he let his gaze wander across the high ceiling and along the adjacent wall.

Initially the room had no windows, but during the recent battle a cannon-ball, whether British or French, redefined the architecture by breaching the outer wall. A gap, wide in its upper part and narrowing towards the floor, opened a view of the bay and the walls of the fortress above it. Perched on the table, Bush could see the stranded shipwreck sitting motionless in the waters stilled by the evening.

The surgeon, contemplating, bowed his head over the tray with an arrangement of tools; he picked up one of the knives and fingered a dried blotch that adhered to the blade. His British assistant moved to stand at the rear end of the table, and Bush caught his sidelong glance as the young man looked at him through the loop of a tourniquet. Bush prudently looked away at once, not to embarrass the boy even more.

He could feel the first cut being made, but he looked in the other direction all the time, his eyes on the Sutherland in the bay. In the waning light its contours were dim and yet familiar, and it was easy to imagine, even without actually seeing, how the French carried on their work of dismantling the enemy vessel. First they immobilized it so that its deck was stuck in a steady horizontal line; the sand assisted them and sucked onto its keel, compressing it to prevent any unwanted movement. Then they cleared the field for operation, removing the dead tissues off the deck and dropping the once living and now defunct parts of the ship's frame into water without further concern. Once the waste did not prevent the eye from following the operation's course, they reached for the sharp tools to split the planks, the ship's wooden skin, from its carcass until the inner layers were bare. And only then, with the steady strokes of the saw, they carved, and cut, and divided, and separated, until the necessary parts were extracted from the shattered remains.

"Done, sir," the boy breathed out voicelessly as something slid down from his end of the table and hit the floor with a wet thump. The Italian surgeon, blinking off the droplets of sweat onto the skin of Bush' thigh, narrowed his eyes as he estimated a length of thick thread, which his British volunteer cut neatly into equal measures.

"He's about to tie you up, sir. The Italian's done good work, it's a handsome stump you've got there, sir." The boy tried to smile in encouragement, but in the soot and grime on his face the expression was indecipherable and weird.

Somebody groaned in impatient wordless anguish almost under the table, and the surgeon cursed and hurried on, tying the knots with the deftness that could make any macrame artist jealous. Bush tongued the wood in his mouth - it was smoothed with his saliva and bore the same copper-tinted taste of blood; its smoothness was deceitful, and he could feel tiny splinters irritate his gums. It didn't bother him, and he knew it meant that things were beginning to go wrong, that this distance growing between him and the crowded barrack could only be a sign of him finally losing grasp of his own mind. He longed for the pain, but even that wasn't there any more, having fallen off of him to rest together with that discarded piece on the floor.

His gaze moved to the breach in the wall again. It was night already; the ramparts of the fortress were dark, but higher up the hill, where the main buildings were, early lights began to show. Bush let his stare travel from one lit square to another, finding a strange reassurance in this gradual progress, until his eyes stopped on a window where the light was dimmed. He peered into the distance, like he always did on the quarterdeck, sure that his sight would not fail.

It was a human silhouette. A faceless shade of somebody who stood by the window, and the view before the person must have been the same that Bush had beheld from his table: the slopes of the hills, green and gray in the daylight and black at night, and the water of the bay below, framed by the foam of tidal waves, and behind that, the darker mass of the conquered ship.

It was a wild guess, yet for a moment Bush fancied it could be his captain, and he wondered if surrendering a ship felt anywhere like having a limb severed. But metaphors weren't his trend; the truth he held onto with desperation was that he and Hornblower were still alive and, albeit for the moment somewhat less of, the same men they always were.


End file.
